2. Tuberculosis water
In the PPR, it was hard to get any good coffee or tea, or soft drinks in the summertime. Among teas, the Georgian ones were widely known to be the worst, so they are probably not missed by anyone today. Coffee was brewed “Turkish style”, which means that boiling water was poured onto the coarsely-ground coffee, and this custom is still practised here and there. Both coffee and tea were served in glasses with basket-like holders made of metal.
Part of the PPR’s folklore, fondly remembered by many, was the street wagons with carbonators. They offered soda water, sometimes with a little artificially-flavoured syrup added. The glasses in which the drink was served were so poorly washed that the drink itself gained the nickname gruźliczanka (tuberculosis water).
In many houses, people used siphons to make soda water. These devices even had their own place in Polish cinema. The legendary Polish actor Zbigniew Cybulski played a siphon-maker in the film There Will Be No Divorces.
The so-called “private initiatives” sold artificially-coloured orangeade in small foil bags. In the 70s, a distant cousin of Coca-Cola named Polo-Cockta appeared. The drink was hardly a substitute for the original but many people used to find it quite tasty and recall it with fondness. The product has survived to this day under a different name. Just like the aforementioned siphon, Polo-Cockta also featured in a film – the fantasy comedy Kingsajz from 1987, in which the drink had magical properties: it enabled gnomes called Polocockters to remain in a human-sized state – the eponymous “kingsajz” (the English phrase “king size” written phonetically in Polish).
At home and in canteens, there were also compotes, fruit cocktails and sour milk to drink. An orange-flavoured soda called “Ptyś” was also popular.
3. Dairy delivered to the door
A widely-practised custom that disappeared after 1989 was the daily delivery of milk to one's front door. An entire month's subscription to the service could be bought in groceries for a small fee. Every morning, staircases in all blocks of flats resounded with the clinking of glass bottles topped with an aluminium cap. Nowadays, many people miss not only the milk deliveries, but all of the PPR’s dairy products: cottage cheese, sour cream and kefir. They also claim that it tasted better than what we buy today in the supermarkets, something which also applies to bread.
4. Nightmare at the kindergarden
For most of the children born in the PPR, the meals served in nurseries and kindergartens were a real nightmare. For breakfast, it was semolina, burnt milk with skin formed on top, or milk soups with overcooked noodles and, of course, milk skin. However, noodles with cottage cheese, “lazy” dumplings (with cottage cheese mixed into the dough) with breadcrumbs, rice with cream and overcooked apples, or racuchy (a kind of pancake or sweet fritter, often with apple inside) – all of them abundantly sprinkled with sugar – are childhood dishes many adults still gladly savour. During meals, children were forced to eat everything on the plate. For dessert, a liquid jelly or pudding was served. The food was meant to be nutritious and everyone was supposed to eat “properly”.
5. Marzipan from beans
In the PPR, people became masters of improvisation – substituting ingredients and creating dishes out of nothing: chocolate desserts without chocolate, marzipan from beans or carrots, pork cutlet made from mortadella. The theme was picked up by cookbooks, which published advice on what to replace the missing ingredients with. And thus, ham was for example replaced by mortadella (which, by the way, didn't have much in common with the Italian version). Instead of vinegar or lemon juice, lettuce was eaten with sour cream. Some dishes were given names referring to foreign countries, though they themselves had nothing common with those countries – for example, Breton beans, Greek fish or Japanese herring.
When facing problems with the meat supply, resourceful housewives used to inform each other discreetly about what had only just appeared in a given shop. Meat dishes could also be ordered in restaurants. There were pork cutlets (still popular today), steak tartare, pig’s knuckles, bryzol (a pounded beef or pork steak), sztufada (a kind of stewed beef), Pozharsky cutlet, and paprikash, as well as giblets (liver, lungs, brains and kidneys), which have recently become popular again.
On Sunday, there was broth cooked with wołciel (a portion of beef or veal on the bone). It was recorded by Małgorzata Musierowicz in her cult novel Opium w Rosole (Opium in Broth). Cold cuts were hard to get, but their quality wasn’t bad. The most popular Sunday dinners, still popular in many houses, were the aforementioned broth or tomato soup, and roasted chicken or pork cutlet served with sauerkraut or puréed beets and potatoes.
Despite the hardships, Polish cuisine flourished during the holidays. Although Polish Christmas is primarily associated with breaded carp (the fish was popularised in this time), other dishes, such as borscht with dumplings, mushroom soup, and traditional cabbage, were also prepared. In houses where families from the former eastern Polish borderlands lived, kutia (a traditional Christmas dish made of boiled wheat grains, poppy seed, nuts and honey) was also popular.
Easter brought with it baked hams and bacon, as well as hard-boiled eggs served with horseradish. The custom of eating fried carp has survived to this day, and a large part of Polish society can’t even imagine a Christmas Eve supper without it on their table.